English

Ireland reeked throughout the nineteenth century from the pages
of English representation.
The reputed stench of its cabins, cesspools, and dungheaps became a shameful index of national backwardness and the essential mark of Irish olfactory identity. In response to the odor of primitiveness that clung to them also, Ireland’s rising middle classes set about a program of national decontamination. Led by the emblematic figure of native Victorian propriety, the Catholic priest, this modernizing class carried the mantras of civility and hygiene to the countryside and the rural home, imposing upon a recalcitrant peasantry a new, “enlightened,” olfactory register predicated on an intolerance of traditional odors. The groundwork for this transformation was the castigation of Ireland’s domestic cottage by English observers and, in particular, the metonymic substitution of the peasantry’s pigs for Irish national character – a discursive reordering that, though it encountered resistance from a peasantry devoted to an old Gaelic order of sensory values, was completed
and even sanctified by a Catholic Church bent on producing modern, disciplined subjects. The smells of everyday life, as a result, took on new meanings. This paper examines Irish and British literary and historical texts around the turn of the twentieth century to uncover that meaning and expose the role of olfaction in the production of the peculiar Gaelo-Catholic ideology of domesticity that until recent decades governed rural Ireland.

Abstract

This essay considers the inordinate impact that a small highly motivated cadre of religious can have on the life of a devout country. As the Catholic Church responded to secular models of the nineteenth-century hero by refurbishing its saints, so the Irish Church promoted the native saint as the sole authentic positive stereotype deserving of the Irishman’s emulation. At a time when the concepts of Irishness and manliness were being contested, The League of St Columba proposed that the physical, psychological, and spiritual characteristics of Colmcill be materialized in the new Irish youth. By folding the mystical rhetoric of Catholicism into the search for national identity, the League altered the course of Irish nationalism, and deeply inflected the trajectory of Irish manly development. While Colmcill’s ascendance as emulatory type was brief, the qualities he was shaped to embody were reinscribed in the Catholic priest, who himself became installed as the aspirational model for the youth of Ireland.

German Blockseminar at the Catholic University of Eichstatt-Ingolstadt in 2008.

Goals:
This course aims to give students a firm understanding of works and authors of a certain period in the history of American Literature. In addition to introducing basic literary concepts, it furthermore stresses these basic skills: reading and analyzing English prose and poetry, researching, rewriting and presenting materials in a scientific manner, speaking freely before the class, and writing a paper with a clear thesis, according to scientific standards. As much as possible, and time permitting, we will attempt to achieve these goals through communicative activities in the group. This course will be reading-centered, so the chief requirement is that you make a commitment to keeping up with the reading, and that you come to class prepared to discuss what you have read. It is recommended that you read all literature at your own pace and leisure during the semester as you will most likely not be able to read the literature along with the course progression.

Blood exists in the overlap of social systems-above all religious, political, aesthetic, and scientific, especially medical ones-and thus adds breadth and depth to readings of canonical as well as neglected texts. I trace "blood" because it places all humans in a global, meaningful relation to novels, poems, serial texts, essays, medical literature, and histories.

LTEN 149 (B00) - THEMES IN ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE

Fall 2012

Instructor: Sören Fröhlich
Meetings: Tu, Th 09:30-10:50 in WLH 2114
Contact: [email protected], Office: LIT 240, Office hours: Tu 12-2, Th 2-3 and by appointment.

If You Want Blood: Thematic Readings of U.S. Blood Discourses

Course Description: This is an upper-division undergraduate course designed to teach and train scholarly approaches to literature. It focuses on what I call “blood discourses,” meaning linguistic usages or interactive utterances attached to a social practice, to sketch out ways that blood was and is evaluated and how it structures and is structured in culture, especially literature, in medicine, and in history. We will read texts from a wide range of genres, periods, and media to follow the question: what is blood?

Humans may have always thought about blood, but this course will focus on how the understanding of blood changed over time, and how cultural representations of blood reflect and reinforce these changes. Blood is ever-present, from the latest splatter film to genetic engineering, from debates on blood quantum policies to the Eucharist. The Oxford English Dictionary has entire pages on entries related to blood. Blood donation is a major business, and so are hygiene products. Why are we so fascinated by blood? This course will examine the fluid that moves between fiction and fact, between body and psyche. We will learn to read fiction in connection to other fields, like medicine, anthropology, and religion.

We will focus on U.S. writing in several genres, as well as visual and performance art, and film, since the mid-nineteenth century that consider blood as a problem or a solution. We will locate some historical strands that still influence texts about blood, and supplement a focus text with readings from theology, sensational and gothic fiction, political and legal contexts, history of science, and media studies.

Course Requirements: Students must complete all of the required readings and see any required films before the class meeting for which they are assigned. Attendance is mandatory. Your active responses to the readings and screenings will provide the foundation for our class discussions. I expect each member of the class to take seriously our collective project of respectfully engaging and responding to the ideas of the participants.

Evaluation:
25% Attendance and participation
25% Weekly assignments and quizzes
50% Final Writing Assignment     
100%

Attendance and participation: I expect you to attend class regularly. Please contact me immediately for any special accommodation, medical problems, or the like. Two (2) unexcused absences are the maximum number to receive a passing grade in attendance.

Piazza page: I provided and will monitor a supplementary piazza.com course website under UCSD, LTEN 149 (https://piazza.com/ucsd/fall2012/lten149/home). Piazza.com is a third-party service in no way affiliated with UCSD. This is supposed to be your space outside the classroom. It is an optional venue for you to exchange ideas, contact each other, plan and discuss presentations, ask questions, discuss readings, look through the additional links I post, and to contact me. While I will closely monitor the content, I do not grade your questions or censor discussions, provided they do not violate UCSD’s Principles of Community (http://www.ucsd.edu/explore/about/principles.html).

Weekly assignments: The weekly sessions include written assignments designed to give you the basic tools needed for a successful literature course and to deepen these skills. You have one oral assignment at the end of class. Please contact me immediately if you think you need help giving an oral presentation in front of the class. The assignments are training in basic skills, but you should also use them to assess your strengths and weaknesses, find areas of interest to you, and also work strategically with the final assignment in mind. They should help you prepare texts, find sources, and rehearse techniques you can then apply quickly and easily in your final assignment. Contact me immediately if you need any special accommodations. (Formatting for all assignments: Letter-size paper, name, title, Times New Roman 12p, 1in. margins, double-spaced, no extra blank lines. I reserve the right to request an electronic copy.) Unless stated otherwise, all assignments are to be completed alone and due at the beginning of the first meeting each week. Quality gains higher grades than quantity and quantity more than blank sheets of paper. Attempts to cheat and trick receive very, very low grades. Any missing assignment receives a zero. There is zero tolerance of plagiarism. (For information on UCSD’s policy, see: http://students.ucsd.edu/academics/academic-integrity/policy.html) I reserve the right to pop quiz you at any time.

Final assignment: Write a five-page research paper (excluding notes and bibliography) or a four-page essay (double-spaced on one side of 8 1/2 by 11" paper, 1" margins, Times New Roman 12 point). The topic has to be related to one or more primary or secondary text assigned in class, a theoretical or conceptual problem, or a historical problem in relation to the texts. I expect you to use the tools acquired during the quarter to conceive, plan, and execute the paper. Contact me with alternative assignment ideas, ideas for collaboration, or if you wish to be examined in a different format no later than week 7. Contact me immediately if you need any special accommodations.
The final assignment has to be completed by Thursday, 12/13/2012, 11AM.

Required books (at UCSD Bookstore = B):
- Bill Hayes. Five Quarts: A Personal and Natural History of Blood.
- Cormac McCarthy. Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West.
 
Required short readings: I tried to reduce cost to the student and opted not to make a course reader. For the short readings, go to the UCSD Library course reserve (= O). Go to http://reserves.ucsd.edu and select our department or me or search by course name. Beginning this quarter, the Library will be password protecting Electronic Reserves. You need to enter this password to view the materials on Electronic Reserves: sf149 (not case sensitive). You can also contact library staff in person at Geisel Library, they will be happy to help you. Also, you may have to consult the audio-visual media, full-length texts, and additional texts I placed on the reserve shelf at the library (= R).

"

Research of African American literature frequently addresses modes of agency and resistance by describing performativity (Gilroy, Roach, Rottenberg). Other research has examined the relation between race and medicine in the U.S. an stressed histories of exploitation, scientific prejudice, and professional discrimination, but also brilliant improvisation and resistance of patients and practitioners (W. Michael Byrd and Linda A. Clayton, Molly Rogers, Thomas J. Ward).

Yet too often these two fields of research remain too far apart. This leads to an unwitting naturalization of the roles that patient and doctor play, which in turn renders the problem of race and performance invisible in the examination of medicine. My paper ties these two fields together through close examination of a text by a master of minstrelsy and medical practitioner: William Wells Brown.

While Brown is best known for his novel Clotel (1853), I focus on his much later and much more complicated text, that has largely escaped critical attention: The Rising Son (1874). This history stands between Martin R. Delany’s Pan-Africanist arguments and African-American histories like George Washington Williams’ History (1882) and Pauline E. Hopkins “Primer” (1905). More specifically, though, I look at the preface, “Memoir of the Author,” yet another biographical sketch about Brown, penned by one Alonzo D. Moore. It relates a fascinating episode in which Brown escapes from a KKK lynching. He uses his medical experience to drug the mob leader but cloaks it in the guise of a conjuring man to access the man’s body. This hitherto unexamined episode brings together Brown’s well-established mastery of the minstrel performance, his renowned presence of mind, and his years of medical practice in a complex layering of performance. In connection to the character of Sam the sham doctor in Clotel, Brown’s nuanced veiling of medical expertise through the performance of a black stock character reveals his mastery over performance of race and class beyond abstract bodies in market places.

His performance is adjusted to audience and situation, all the while performing for his life. I argue that recognizing the sophistication of African American performance must lead to a critical examination of holistic concepts like “medicine” in the context of race. African-American practitioners were keenly aware of their dangerous social position but by no means helpless. We must recognize the full awareness of African American authors to judge the complexity of their statements, but also their actions—after all, Brown once again wins back his freedom by conjuring ‘blackness.’"